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Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Mystery real photo postcard: Four women sitting on the ground

On the heels of last month's real photo postcard featuring a trio of schoolchildren, here's another never-used mystery card.

Again, we have more questions than answers. Who are these four women sitting on the ground? Where were they from? How did their lives turn out?

We can only date the postcard very generally. According to this page on playle.com, the CYKO logo in the stamp box dates this card to sometime between 1904 and the 1920s. That's a pretty wide range. Perhaps someone with a good knowledge of early-century fashions can pinpoint a narrower range of possible years.

Playle.com also features an interesting guide to the value of real photo postcards.1 Some of the most sought-after and valuable postcard topics include small towns, advertising signs, photos from Delaware, Native Americans, pre-1918 baseball stadiums and players2, bygone modes of transportation, quilting bees, and the flu pandemic. So be on the lookout for those topics if you ever come across a cache of old photo postcards!

Here's a closer look at the women on today's postcard.

Footnotes1. The author of the guide provides this amusing (and surely imaginary) example to explain rarity and demand:

"If while searching in a family trunk, one found an RPPC of a woman holding a banner reading 'Woman Voters!' while she was riding a Harley Davidson motorbike up the gangplank of the Titanic in Ireland, one could easily surmise a sense of value to such an image. If that image were proved to be one-of-a-kind, or at least at most one of a few hundred, the value rises even more. Since this mythical image also incorporates 3 high demand collecting areas (Woman's rights, early motorcycles, & the Titanic), 3 aggressively active collecting groups would want to own it. It is these types of factors that drive the value of RPPCs."

2. A real photo postcard of a Negro League baseball player could be worth $4,500 to $25,000, according to the guide.

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About the Author

I'm Chris Otto, a Pennsylvania resident and journalist whose hobbies and interests include old books, ephemera, history, folklore, alpacas, photography and much more. Never stop reading, learning and asking questions! I consider this blog to be a spiritual descendant of Microsoft Encarta and a companion to Wikipedia. Every piece of paper tells a story.
Reach me at chrisottopa (at) gmail.com.

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